The narrator, Herv?, returns to Paris tormented by a painful attack of shingles to discover that Louise and Suzanne, his two elderly great?aunts, are being terrorized and robbed by a gang of extortioners posing as building workers renovating their suburban house. He calls in the police, but the investigation fizzles out in a morass of inertia, buck?passing and covert racism. Wearied, ill, and sliding by degrees into paranoia, the narrator leaves for a holiday. With him goes Vincent, a friend whose ambiguous and menacing presence has become increasingly oppressive and who, at the end of the book, may?or may not?murder him.